The Blog of Bob Rubbens
Or, how I realized that I’ve been coddled by Linux Mint for several years now, and still can’t handle a cutting edge highly configurable OS.
To the people who I’ve told that I’m switching to OpenSUSE as a daily driver for both my work and personal laptops: to my great disappointment, I changed my mind.
My primary reason for wanting to switch is that OpenSUSE is the only widely used European Linux distro I know of, for some definition of “widely”. I’m a proponent of paying for software that you use daily, and if I’m paying for it, I’d like my money to stay (geographically) close.
A secondary reason for switching is that OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a nice rolling-release distro. Given my good experience with Manjaro in the past, I have been itching to move to an OS where all dependencies are more or less up to date all the time.
I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my personal laptop, a Lenovo P50 from 2016, to see if I like OpenSUSE and make sure there are no major problems that could prevent using it as my daily driver. There were some small problems, which I list in the final section below. The specific problems are not the point, though: all were resolved quickly. I liked this experience.
I had a slightly larger problem with a package being removed, largely caused by my own stupidity and naivety. With the help of the nice OpenSUSE community, it got resolved for me as fast as I could conceivably wish without any effort on my part. I liked this too!
All in all, the number of problems had been a little higher than with my previous OS, Linux Mint, and a little more challenging to solve than I’m used to. But the key point here is that I managed. At that point, I was sure that a bright future with my new favourite European OS was just around the corner. Surely, I thought, if you want to put your money where your mouth is, you can’t complain too much when you actually have to put some effort in.
I started preparing to make the switch for both my laptops. However, while making backups of both the laptops, my personal laptop (the one already running OpenSUSE) got a bit laggy for no clear reason. I was just copying some files, and this laptop had never shown any kind of laggyness while doing that before. Given that it’s from 2016, I expect it to be decently supported on must Linux distros, let alone a cutting edge one like OpenSUSE.
This was the last drop. The problem felt like one of those that I can’t solve for the life of me, and will have to just wait for the maintainers to pick up. I don’t even know where to start if I’d like to make some kind of bug report for this. Normally, I’m comfortable with not being able fix minor problems. Sometimes usability of my laptop degrades for a while, and then it gets better. That’s the price you pay for putting in no effort and waiting for other people to solve your problems. I am humbled by, and thankful to, those who maintain these huge and complicated distros!
However, if I’m going to use this for my work laptop, I also have to take my personal situation into account. The OpenSUSE system on my personal laptop had already seen a few fixes “just to get it working”, and with this additional unpredictable laggyness, I was basically accepting degraded system as a starting point. Extrapolating this to my work laptop, which is newer (a Lenovo P1 Gen 3), I should expect at least a similar amount of problems, and plan appropriately. Running those numbers in my head, right then, I realized how much I’d been relying on my work laptop “just working” every single day without any work on my part.
Regrettably, OpenSUSE is not the right OS for me at the moment.
With my tail between my legs, I aborted my switch to OpenSUSE. Instead, I’m staying on Linux Mint for a while longer. Sure, life on the Linux Mint side is also not perfect. I already noticed the volume function keys don’t seem to work out of the box. Given that I’ve only tested it for a few hours, it’s likely there are other things as well.
On the geopolitical side, Linux Mint is, as far as I can tell, not fully European. Going by the nationality of Debian’s creator, Debian seems to have its origins in the US. Ubuntu seems to be more or less British? I’m not sure. Linux Mint is apparently Irish, which is good, but as it still relies heavily on the Ubuntu/Debian ecosystem, there’s lots of room for improvement.
Still, Linux Mint is the devil I’ve known for the past 5 years. And we definitely didn’t have a bad time! Therefore, given that I have to be careful how I spend my time, I’ll have to postpone adopting the European OS. Maybe in the future, when I’m more skilled, have a bit more time, and perhaps OpenSUSE has gotten even better than it already is, I can give it a shot again. I really hope so!
To those considering switching to OpenSUSE, and who don’t mind doing a little bit of maintenance every once in a while: definitely give it a try! On both technical and social levels, I liked using OpenSUSE. This whole situation is more due to what my life is like at the moment, and not due to any shortcomings on OpenSUSE’s side.
For those interested, here are the pinpricks that caused this sweet summer child to abandon his quest for a European Linux distro. They’re probably only meaningful to those with some passing OpenSUSE experience.
When the XFCE terminal is in fullscreen mode, and I switch from the virtual desktop that has e.g. firefox back to the virtual desktop that has the xfce terminal, the task bar remains in view and focused. Because of this, I first have to press Alt+Tab, or reach for the mouse and click, to focus the terminal. A minor problem that is unfortunately quite flow-breaking.
XFCE feels a bit like a second-class desktop environment in the OpenSUSE ecosystem anyway, which is fair, given that their focus is KDE. I tried KDE but didn’t like it as much as XFCE.
The OpenSUSE ecosystem is transitioning away from the way they’ve been doing package management since the beginning of time. Or at least, in terms of supporting tooling around it, as zypper is there to stay as far as I can tell. In practice, this means they’re deprecating YaST, and replacing it with various smaller, more targeted and leaner utilities (e.g. Myrlyn and Cockpit).
I think this is a laudable effort! Paying down tech debt does not just take blood, sweat and tears, but also courage. Unfortunately, it also means the ecosystem is a bit fragmented at the moment, with multiple tools having overlapping responsibilities. If you don’t mind keeping up with the OpenSUSE news and discourse a bit, this is no problem at all. For me, it’s not ideal.
I had OpenSUSE installed on two SSDs, and because of this, had to type my disk encryption password three times: first twice to unlock the HDDs, then once to unlock the logical partition spread over both of the disks. This is a long-standing problem, and doesn’t seem to have an easy fix.
Linux Mint doesn’t have a standard option for setup I had in mind, so I decided to just not use the second SSD in my personal laptop for now. Maybe I’ll go back at some point and use the expert partining mode to get it exactly right. Kudos to the OpenSUSE installer for being so flexible!
Signal is not in the standard repos. You can easily install one from an external repo, which is an acceptable solution, but still: another pinprick.
sudo thunar didn’t work,
xdgsu -c thunar didn’t work either. I’ve never had this
problem before (which, given I’m already 10+ years on Linux, is starting
to mean something). I’m sure I’m just misunderstanding some simple
thing, and that it can be fixed. But I already spent longer on this than
I would expect for something simple and routine like this.
OpenSUSE’s XFCE felt a bit too small compared to what I’m used to. No problem, I can squint my eyes a bit, or scale it up in the long term. But it’s another one of those things that costs a bit of energy.
And just to elaborate a bit more about breaking neovim during an update. This is easily mitigated by moving to a more slowly rolling version of OpenSUSE, e.g. Slowroll or maybe even Leap. But the other problems still remain. Furthermore, on Manjaro, which is also rolling release, problems such as this never happened, so I still feel like there are things I don’t understand about OpenSUSE.
Generated with BYOB.
License: CC-BY-SA.
This page is designed to last.
⇐ [This site is part of the UT webring] ⇒
